1 year ago, we reported that following Unity's and Epic's UDK push to release a commercial grade engine for free (or at a price) that casual and indie game developers can afford, we expected Crysis and the CryENGINE to follow. Today it seems that announcement has been made, by none other than the CEO of Crytek, Cevat Yerli.

In an open letter to the Crytek Modding Community, Cevat discussed how important the modding community is to them, and how much they enjoy witnessing the creativity their community produces when working with CryENGINE. And in a move that mimics earlier announcements from Unity and Epic, Cevat says "This time around, we're going to do things in a different way - offering you the right tools to achieve your vision."

What does this mean? Three things:

An Editor for Crysis 2 will be released early in summer. This will allow you to build new maps, items and more custom content for Crysis 2.

In August 2011 they will be launching a free CryENGINE SDK. It is essentially similar to all of the previous modding SDK's, which will allow you to go above and beyond just building custom content for Crysis 2.

The most significant announcement by far however, is "We'll be giving you access to the latest, greatest version of CryENGINE 3 - the same engine we use internally, the same engine we give to our licensees, the same engine that powers Crysis 2."

To put the 3rd announcement into perspective, CryENGINE 3 is commonly regarded as the most powerful engine in the market, and fetches an equally high licensing price by the companies that use it which includes game developers, the army, movie studios and more. Furthermore this engine is not a stipped down version with limited access to the source. As Cevet's says "This will be a complete version of our engine, including C++ code access, our content exporters (including our LiveCreate real-time pipeline), shader code, game sample code from Crysis 2, script samples, new improved Flowgraph and a whole host of great asset examples, which will allow teams to build complete games from scratch for PC."

While they didn't explicitly state how indie teams license the engine, it looks like it will be similar to Epic's UDK model whereby a rev share % will be put in place to sell the game digitally. Traditional commercial developers will continue to license the engine on a per-seat basis via MyCryENGINE.

My thoughts

This is simply astonishing and brilliant news. While UDK and Unity currently dominate and we haven't seen a huge number of large total conversions released on the Cryengine, though a recent Crash Bandicoot remake on the CryENGINE has been doing the rounds (see video below) which shows the potential. I'd attribute this to the fact that the current tools have largely been locked down by Crysis and only fully available to a few handpicked teams. It looks like that barrier to entry has just been smashed down and with full source code access the sky is the limit.

Your thoughts?

So are you happy with UDK / Unity or are you going to explore the CryENGINE?
Do you feel like the engines power is simply too much for an indie team to utilize, given the sheer amount of art assets and detail CryENGINE games typically demand?
Please share your opinion below, because this is a significant step forward for all game developers.

Just because there may not be as many TC's as other engines, does not mean the engine is limited, and does make any other mod unworthy. Seen the same argument from a non-troll 'it has no Total Conversions, modding failure' is a ignorant argument.
If cinco even knew anything about the effort and time that needs to go into making a total conversion of playable quality, he would probably not make that statement.

Cryengine is still rather unknown in a way, some mods I see for Source would be much better with CE. The SDK may just change that, with hundreds of people trying it on day one.
Its one of the best engines for modders today.

Crytek can talk about it, but I'm not holding my breath.
If there is no misquoting here, these are big commitments to be upheld.
Not just talk about their engine being free to indies, but also being open source?

I hope Crytek does this; it is a smart move, and will prevent CE3 from sharing the sad fate that CE2 has.

I honor the CE2 engine, the achievement there and the game Crysis.. but the modding scene is dead, and I can say from experience that it is due to poor support, bugs in the engine, lack of freedom.

At this point of Crytek doesn't do it, they just won't be able to compete at all. Epic offers an engine that I think since its many updates over the past several months, have really put it ahead of CryEngine 3, and manages to keep a very generous license deal for indies, considering the facts.

Not sure about misquoting but its right from the Crymod website, which confirms all about the modding, SDK etc. :)

I think they stand a pretty good chance. Big open worlds, real time, graphics are not everything... but pretty powerful graphics plus more. If they could just get full dx11 features in there its a perfect competitor/alternative to UDK. More people now also have the hardware to run cryengine, and the cryengine is much less demanding, so also a good thing.

Not trying to big up the engine, and by no means is better than UDK, or vice versa, hopefully Crytek will keep true to their word, it's going to be great indies get another engine to toy with. :)

Would certainly be good to know a lot more about the royalties etc when going commercial with a game, and who then owns the rights to IP, would Crytek be entitled to use the IP at their own will, sort of thing.

oh my god, I haven't started creating my game project just yet, but the fact that c++ source code for free? I may use the cryengine 3 and abandon my unreal engine 3 books just for the fact i can use my newly learned c++ skills.

Source is unflexible, stupid and painful to use but that didn't stop the community in coming out with great mods did it? And since Crytek are giving out FULL C++ source access to the engine as well as their internal documentation, I think your opinion on the CryEngine will be invalidated.

A game engine doesn't make the games for you. All game development requires hard work no matter what engine you use. I really don't know what you mean with unflexible. Name this wonder engine that makes life so simple please.

Yeah when I read this yesterday I was like yayayay! It's a shame they've kept silent for quite a while, which caused some unrest over at Crymod, but it's good to finally know that, and how, they are going to support both modding and 'indie' development.

I hope you know that the capabilities of the engine far exceed what was done with Crysis 2, the licenced engine does have a lot of next gen features like UE3 does including DX10/11 rendering which we are told is also being patched into Crysis 2.

Crysis's story was ******* terrible dude. Why do you want it back? QUAKE had better character development. Crysis's voice work made the acting in a Capcom game seem *decent*.
"My chute is gone... my..damn..chute is gone..."

If we could get rid of all taboos we'd be able to achieve world peace, for taboos are the source of all disagreements. The only way to eradicate them is to redefine them. I curse frequently to take the edge off of it to the point where it is no longer a taboo. I curse for world peace.

Okay first, that was a mock quote of the game. What do you want him to do, censor his quote?

Second, I would argue that the use of foul language indicates a lack of eloquence in the language (whatever language is being spoken/written), and thus should not be used in common or educated speech, regardless of taboo.